THE SLANG OF PRIGS

How I myself became a traditionalist is a bit less than clear to me. I was not brought up in a home where the purest English was spoken, though my parents, neither of whom went to college, made it through life without the crutches of jargon or psychobabble, and the word “lifestyle” (used today, I am delighted to report, as a brand name for condoms) never passed their lips. As a student, I discovered that many of the twentieth-century prose styles I most admired — T. S. Eliot’s, Evelyn Waugh’s, Edmund Wilson’s — achieved an extra boost from the assured correctness of their English: Correctness lent logic and precision, which in turn lent solidity and authority, which, cumulatively, ended in elegance of what I took to be a virile kind.

I cannot vouch for the aerobic benefits to be derived from taking up the traditionalist position, but it can leave one in a condition of nearly perpetual agitation. A recent morning’s gutter press — I refer, of course, to the New York Times — contains a piece about a play on the relationship between Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in which the writer remarks that the friendship between the two women was “sensual, tempestuous, supremely enabling.” Why can’t my eyes glide gently past the phrase “supremely enabling” without my sighing and thinking that, were I Commissar of Culture, its author would be put to an excruciatingly slow death in which high voltage fingernail removers and thick, lubricious snakes would play a significant part?

At the heart of all disputes about language is the matter of authority. In the end, “Says Who?” remains a key question. In a now bygone day, one might have said, Webster’s says, or the Oxford English Dictionary says. I often used to say — and still sometimes do say — H. W. Fowler, author of Modern English Usage, says. But dictionaries have lost their old confidence, and now tend to be, in the language of the trade, descriptive rather than prescriptive: content, that is, merely to describe how a word is used rather than to prescribe how it ought to be used. Vox freakin’ Populi!

Perhaps the saddest surrender in recent years was the appearance, in 1996, of The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage written by R. W. Burchfield. This edition, along with being largely descriptive in spirit, took the occasion to fire a number of shots at its predecessor and, almost everywhere sending up the white flag on prescriptive lexicography, turned out to be not The New Fowler but The Un-Fowler.

The great Henry Fowler was of course thoroughly English, and it is an indication of the past cultural supremacy of the English that, despite the many differences in pronunciation, spelling, grammar, and usage between British and American English, more people interested in these matters turned to Fowler’s Modern English Usage than to its American counterpart, Wilson Follett’s Modern American Usage, a book that was first published in 1966, forty years after Fowler’s volume appeared. Follett died before his book was completed. Useful though it is, Modern American Usage wanted the elements of oddity, idiosyncrasy, authority, and character that made Modern English Usage a great and, I would say, enduring book.

Usage, which includes the realms of correct grammar and precise use of words, was always thought by Americans to be the preserve of the English. The language itself, after all, was called English, not American, and Englishmen prided themselves on using the language better than we. But the cultural supremacy of the English is now — poof! — all but gone, perhaps illustrating the sad truth that cultural power dissipates in the wake of lost political power. Today the English probably use the language as coarsely as do most Americans: English social science and journalism seem of a shoddy piece with ours, which may be why so many English men and women are able to edit American magazines and newspapers without noticeably raising their quality.

As a nostalgic Anglophile, I find I no longer yearn to avail myself of British words and phrasing I once much admired. I have long ago given up on “early on,” chiefly because it has been much overused by my fellow colonists. I used to enjoy saying “put paid to,” but do so no longer. I am saving for my old age the phrase “this will see me out,” so useful when buying what one feels will be one’s final overcoat, car, or any other item that one probably won’t require repurchasing before meeting the Ugly Customer (as William Hazlitt called Death). I have never had much use for “in the event,” the English stand-in for “as it happens.” Every so often I read a sentence with an English touch that seems to me more elegant than an American might write: “True, there is Pompey’s Pillar,” the English Egyptologist John Ray writes, “which is nothing to do with Pompey but is not bad as pillars go.” American English would call for “has nothing to do,” which seems to me, for reasons I cannot quite comprehend, less good. But for the most part I do not think the English any longer manipulate the language better than we do, which is a shame.

The Internet is beginning to look as if it may be an enemy of careful English. Something there is about language that appears on a computer screen that divests it of the responsibility to be in any way stylish, let alone correct. Things written to be read on the screen, some-how, haven’t the same weight, density, gravity of things written on the page. The computer screen speaks to impermanence — hit that delete button and it’s gone — and impermanence releases one from the obligation to get things exactly right. Expending style for computer readers seems a bit, perhaps more than a bit, beside the point. People who go to computers for their information are, if anything, likely to be put off by style: They want just the facts, ma’am. I was once asked to write for a large Internet company at a decently high fee, but I found I had no appetite for it. I am no content-provider (a heartbreakingly unhappy phrase) but a writer. And I write to be printed on paper — the thin newsprint of the daily press, the clay-covered stock of the slick weekly magazines, the heavy rag of the quarterly journals, the acid-free pages of books, but paper only, not for a screen, where what I write can be so readily deleted, trashed, scorched into non-existence.

A key element in usage is a serious concern about felicitous distinctions. It is at this point that style connects with usage. If one does not care about the different shades of meaning between sensual and sensuous, jealousy and envy, fewer and lesser, further and farther, permit and allow, congruent and congruous, among and between, eager and anxious, brutal and cruel, one probably doesn’t care much about style either. Without an interest in usage one probably cannot appreciate, because unlikely to apprehend, style, of which correctness and precision are crucial parts.

One of the few ways I have of checking on the quality of books of modern usage is to see where they stand on those issues, questions, and problems on which I am myself so touchy. The more intelligent books, you will perhaps be less than astonished to learn, tend overwhelmingly to be those that agree with me; and the really good ones extend my knowledge on many points.

Two new books of American usage have recently been published, one a serious revision of Wilson Follett’s Modern American Usage by Erik Wensberg, the other A Dictionary of Modern American Usage by Bryan A. Garner. Wensberg is a Manhattan man-of-all-work editor, Garner is a lawyer and lexicographer who has previously specialized in legal texts.

The Garner volume is nearly twice the length of the Wensberg, but the latter, owing to the rather short fuse of Wensberg’s temper, provides more in the way of colorful fireworks. Wensberg’s tone is that of a man impatient, slightly ticked, sometimes appalled at the oafishness of his fellow Americans. Garner, a lawyer by training, is more evenhanded; he also seems to suggest that all is not lost, if only people use a bit better sense. Sometimes, though, he strikes the quick peremptory note I like in reference works: “illusory; illusive. The former is preferred.” Case closed.

Here are the first two of Wensberg’s five sentences on the distinction between “cynical” and “skeptical”: “We might as well interchange murder and surgery as mix up these two descriptives. They have strayed far from their sources in Greek philosophy, but in modern use neither is replaceable by the other.” The calmer Garner on the distinction between “anticipate” and “expect” reports that the first means to take care of or preclude by prior action, or greatly to look forward to, and adds that the two terms have mistakenly come to be used interchangeably owing to slipshod extension, and finally advises: “generally avoid anticipate when it’s merely equivalent to expect.”

Wensberg nicely formulates the importance of adding to the stock of distinction in language: “Almost always, the move toward a distinction, the positive work of mind on language, is a gain. The negative change, away from distinct ideas, is generally the result of heedlessness or ignorance, and hence a loss.” Wensberg and I are in agreement in finding the word “societal” ugly. He lists compounds formed with “driven,” as in “policy-driven,” as among his “forbidden words”; nicely knocks off the word “arguable” by writing, “Although several centuries old, this word is flighty and should be left to its wayward ways”; and sticks a nice pin in “prestigious” by reminding his readers that “fifty years ago [it] still described juggling, sleight-of-hand, or cheating, as in prestidigitation.”

No book of usage can be complete, but it is a pity that neither Wensberg nor Garner has an entry on the dopey usage of “literate” to mean well-read or even literary, as in “He’s a highly literate fellow.” Better, in my view, to leave “literate” in its pristine and perfectly sensible meaning of able to read and write. Garner has nothing on “academia,” which Wensberg lays into as a piece of pure pre-tension, though he doesn’t touch on the student crudity that speaks of doing well in “one’s academics.” Garner is good at knocking down those two silliest of academic locutions, “as it were” and “if you will,” while Wensberg does a nice punch-out on “dysfunctional.” The many meanings of the word “attitude” — as in “That’s a jacket with attitude” — go unremarked by both lexicographers. New word though it may be, “attitude” has already acquired too many blurry meanings to have a long life in the lingo Americano. “You cannot have a clear language without clear terms,” wrote Tocqueville in his chapter on the American use of language, adding that “in matters of language democracies prefer obscurity to hard work.”

Sometimes a word that begins life in quite hateful fashion takes on, after several odd twists, amusing new meanings. I was a strong campaigner against what I used to call “the flying whatever,” or the use of “whatever” as an even weaker substitute for et cetera, as in “I find you beautiful, intelligent, whatever,” or “I may go to law school, do an MBA, whatever.” Pretty stupid stuff. Then I began to notice subtle inflections behind the word, which suggested that it was being used, fairly effectively, as a quieter, subtler version of “screw,” “bug,” or (an English twist here) “sod” off, especially as a nicely sour rejoinder to being offered advice one doesn’t want to hear. “Whatever!” one says, usually walking away.

“No problem,” on the other hand, has become an enormous problem. “Thank you,” one says. “No problem” is increasingly the rejoinder. “You’re welcome” is in danger of departing the language. The other day I called an attorney, who, I was told, was in a meeting. I said I would call back later. “No problem,” his secretary said. No problem for whom, I thought: her, me, the attorney? No problem — often “Hey, no problem,” sometimes “No prob,” not yet but perhaps soon “N.P.” — doesn’t seem to me to work anywhere near as well as does the Italian prego, which can mean “please,” “thank you,” “excuse me,” “not at all,” and “all right,” and has the further virtue of ending with a vowel.

“Fun” as an adjective — as in “fun time,” “fun person,” “fun place” — gets no mention from Wensberg, though one would have thought it would cause him to break out in hives. Garner mentions it with mild disdain, quotes some egregious examples, and closes by saying that “To traditionalists, these forms remain blemishes in writing and speech alike. They are distinctly non-U,” by which he means favored by the uneducated classes, though my own sense is that those who have been to college use “fun” in this way quite as much as anyone else. This new usage shall always remain memorable to me because a few years ago, coming out of a restaurant that attempted to supply a 1950s atmosphere, a woman I was with, who is perhaps a mite meticulous about food and language both, remarked: “We must never come here again. It is a place, I fear, for fun couples.”

“Words are born and die,” wrote the linguistically scrupulous Ronald Knox in Enthusiasm, “they live only so long as they have an important errand to fulfill, by expressing what needs expression.” Necessity provides the true test. Thus nearly every dopey phrase from the 1960s — “doing my thing,” “not my bag,” “right on” — has been neatly wiped off the linguistic map, leaving only the estimable “rip-off.” “Rip-off” may be assured a continued life if only because it seems to be needed to describe the 1960s. The loss of the word “disinterested,” now most often used as a synonym for “uninterested,” suggests that the majestic quality of disinterest itself is no longer an important part of contemporary culture.

The line that is most difficult to walk in usage is that between good sense and pedantry. Even the greatest of writers can go off the rails by becoming too greatly precisian. James Boswell reports that Samuel Johnson used to find “fault with me for using the phrase to make money. ‘Don’t you see (said he) the impropriety of it? To make money is to coin it: You should say get money.'” That seems to me stepping over the line. Yet Johnson was right in being indignant about the sloppy use of “idea” when only a notion or an opinion was what was being talked about. I myself get nicely worked up when people misuse “issue,” as in “She has issues with her parents over that.” “Problems,” my dear knucklehead, the word you want is “problems.”

“Sometimes,” Wittgenstein says, “an expression has to be withdrawn from language and sent for cleaning — then it can be put back into circulation.” Wensberg and Garner offer a number of fine candidates, among them bottom line, viable, scenario, synergy, no-brainer, proactive, hands-on, window of opportunity, dialogue, defining moment, hidden agenda, and many more. I would add values, icon, intriguing (where interesting or fascinating is meant) and process, and should like to see focus, currently the deadest metaphor in the language, sent to Wittgenstein’s cleaners and not picked up till sometime around 2050.

One of the great usage questions of our day has to do with the language of what, depending on one’s own politics, one would call either sexism or political correctness: sexism if one is of the left, political correctness if one is of the right. (“Political correctness” is on the list of Bryan Garner’s “Vogue Words”; it wouldn’t be on mine, because I think it continues to describe something that really does exist.) The old word “gender,” once confined to a grammatical context, is greatly overused, but Erik Wensberg makes a good case for it in certain connections, citing the sentence “What determined promotion at our place wasn’t skill but sex,” which suggests something rather radically different than what may have been intended.

Where things become nervous-making for many people is in the choice of the gender of singular pronouns that must be made to agree with their antecedents. By now all but the most psychotic of feminists and craven of feminist fellow-travelers have given up on his/her, s/he, s/he/it, heesh, hizer, and the rest of these loony tune words; even they, unaesthetic souls that they are, have had to recognize the comic absurdity of such constructions. (Some absurdities, such as chair for chairman or chairwoman, seem, for the moment, to have won acceptance, at least in universities.) Others, wishing to score points simultaneously for both being on the right side and providing a surprise, will — sly dogs — write such things as “Every economist knows that she . . . ” or “No boxer in her right mind would. . . . ” I know an academic writer who did this sort of thing a fair amount and ended up having a sex-change operation. Did he suffer, after years of playing this game, one wonders, grave gender confusion?

In his entry on sexism, Bryan Garner takes what is probably the safest position now available on these matters. He points out the silliness of such constructions as “womyn” and “herstory.” He allows that “as a non-sexist suffix, -person leaves much to be desired,” though he doesn’t seem to mind “chair,” “ombuds,” and other emasculations. He thinks it time to kiss off -ess endings (poetess, authoress, etc.) and I am in general agreement with him here — Jewess has for me, a touchy member of the tribe, always carried an extra large dollop of unpleasantness. I myself, though, should hate to lose the charming word “aviatrix.”

Garner holds that one should strive for “a style that doesn’t even hint at the issue” — a style that, “on the one hand, no reasonable person could call sexist, and on the other hand, never suggests you’re contorting your language to be non-sexist.” That is a sensible enough formulation, and yet I prefer Erik Wensberg, who seems to be bored with all this fiddle and who ends a lengthy discussion of the matter of pronouns and their antecedents by asserting:

Those who believe that by changing an English idiom they change women’s lot will go on asserting that the figurative he is no longer figurative and is no longer to be used. Those who think that changing English idiom is a long way around to a good social end will use common sense and give words in a sentence due weight as before.

For myself, I happen to resent what I think the totalitarian tendency of the politically correct police and feel it remains worth fighting against. With P. D. James, I think they constitute “a kind of linguistic fascism,” whose “promoters wish to dictate not only what we say but what we think.” P. D. James thinks that, in England, they have happily been able “to kill off its worst manifestations by humor and ridicule.” In America we have not had the same good luck, for humor and ridicule here doesn’t seem to work — or at least it hasn’t thus far — as an antidote on the deeply humorless and ridiculous.

Erik Wensberg thinks that “the worst enemy of modern languages is the universal desire to show off” through the use of pretentious jargon, so that a simple meeting place becomes a venue or the chairman of a meeting becomes a facilitator.

No doubt there’s a lot of this going around just now; it sometimes seems pandemic, which is to say, all over the joint. Most of it, though, is very thin in its pretensions; favored by physicians, airline pilots, and above all lower-echelon bureaucrats though it is, it does not seem to me as corrupting as the squishy, gauze-over-the-lens language of which the following — not long ago spoken by the president of the Juilliard School of Music about his program for general education for his students — is a fairly standard example:

I wanted a different feel. I wanted a place as wonderfully rigorous as it has always been in the values and standards of the profession, but I also wanted an atmosphere that was constructive and welcoming, in which it was safe to take chances and form a very precise focus within a holistic approach.

What appals here is that I agree with everything this man says; I would only argue against his right to say it this way.

If people who lead elite cultural institutions talk like therapists in brothels, are things better elsewhere? Not in politics, certainly, where Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the only senator in decades to use language as if there were some element of choice entailed, will soon be gone from public life. We haven’t had a president with a distinctive style since Harry S. Truman; the rest have been ventriloquist’s dummies, uttering the less-than-impressive words of hired helpers. Elsewhere in public life — entertainment, journalism, academic life — one chiefly encounters mere dreary articulation. No profession, social class, or group is notable for using language with the care — let us not speak of the flair — it deserves. The best one can hope is to find those rare but still extant human oases, isolated men and women who understand the deep delight possible in words and therefore attempt to use them with skill.

In an appendix to Modern American Usage, Eric Wensberg notes that “fatalism about language cannot be the philosophy of those who care about language.” Doubtless he is right. Yet fatalism may be part of the attraction. The New York Times of July 13, carried the obituary of a senior editor of the Christian Science Monitor named Earl W. Foell, of whom, in the obit’s first paragraph, it is said that he had “a romantic attachment to precision and clarity.” This Mr. Foell, it seems, “was obsessed with comprehensibility.” Strange obsession for an editor, to want his readers to understand what his writers are saying. Far out — perhaps a touch or two farther out than one may have expected. As Kingsley Amis, who could himself be quite maniacal about language, used to say, “There’s no stopping regress.” Yet there can be no more amusing work than to try.

Joseph Epstein is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD.